Sir Isaac Newton PRS MP (/njutn/;

[8]
25 December 1642 20 March 1727
[1]
) was an
English physicist and mathematician (described in his own day as a "natural philosopher") who is widely
recognised as one of the most influential scientists of all time and as a key figure in the scientific revolution. His
bookPhilosophi Naturalis Principia Mathematica ("Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"), first
published in 1687, laid the foundations for classical mechanics. Newton also made seminal contributions
to optics and shares credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the invention of calculus.
Newton's Principia formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation, which dominated scientists' view of
the physical universe for the next three centuries. By deriving Kepler's laws of planetary motion from his
mathematical description of gravity, and then using the same principles to account for the trajectories
ofcomets, the tides, the precession of the equinoxes, and other phenomena, Newton removed the last doubts
about the validity of the heliocentric model of the cosmos. This work also demonstrated that the motion of
objects on Earth and ofcelestial bodies could be described by the same principles. His prediction that the Earth
should be shaped as an oblate spheroid was later vindicated by the measurements of Maupertuis, La
Condamine, and others, which helped convince most Continental European scientists of the superiority of
Newtonian mechanics over the earlier system of Descartes.
Newton also built the first practical reflecting telescope and developed a theory of colour based on the
observation that a prism decomposes white light into the many colours of the visible spectrum. He formulated
an empirical law of cooling, studied the speed of sound, and introduced the notion of a Newtonian fluid. In
addition to his work on calculus, as a mathematician Newton contributed to the study of power series,
generalised the binomial theorem to non-integer exponents, and developed Newton's method for
approximating the roots of a function.
Newton was a fellow of Trinity College and the second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of
Cambridge. He was a devout but unorthodox Christian and, unusually for a member of the Cambridge faculty
of the day, he refused to take holy orders in the Church of England, perhaps because he privately rejected the
doctrine of the Trinity. Beyond his work on the mathematical sciences, Newton dedicated much of his time to
the study of biblical chronologyand alchemy, but most of his work in those areas remained unpublished until
long after his death. In his later life, Newton became president of the Royal Society. He also served the British
government as Warden and Master of the Royal Mint.
Contents
[hide]
1 Life
o 1.1 Early life
o 1.2 Middle years
1.2.1 Mathematics
1.2.2 Optics
1.2.3 Mechanics and gravitation
o 1.3 Classification of cubics
o 1.4 Later life
o 1.5 After death
1.5.1 Fame
1.5.2 Commemorations
o 1.6 In popular culture
2 Personal life
3 Religious views
o 3.1 Effect on religious thought
o 3.2 End of the world
o 3.3 Alchemy
4 Enlightenment philosophers
5 Royal Mint
6 Laws of motion
7 Apple incident
8 Works
o 8.1 Primary sources
9 See also
10 References
11 Bibliography
12 Further reading
13 External links
Life
Early life
Main article: Early life of Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton was born (according to the Julian calendar in use in England at the time) on Christmas Day, 25
December 1642 (NS 4 January 1643
[1]
), at Woolsthorpe Manor in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, a hamlet in
the county of Lincolnshire. He was born three months after the death of his father, a prosperous farmer also
named Isaac Newton. Born prematurely, he was a small child; his mother Hannah Ayscough reportedly said
that he could have fit inside a quart mug (which, depending on the quart measure in use at that time, could
have ranged from 2.25 litre (the Winchester quart, in use in England at the time) to 0.95 litre (the US quart)
with several possibilities beween). When Newton was three, his mother remarried and went to live with her
new husband, the Reverend Barnabus Smith, leaving her son in the care of his maternal grandmother,
Margery Ayscough. The young Isaac disliked his stepfather and maintained some enmity towards his mother
for marrying him, as revealed by this entry in a list of sins committed up to the age of 19: "Threatening my
father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them." Newton's mother had three children from her
second marriage.
[9]
Although it was claimed that he was once engaged,
[10]
Newton never married.


Newton in a 1702 portrait by Godfrey Kneller


Isaac Newton (Bolton, Sarah K. Famous Men of Science. NY: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1889)
From the age of about twelve until he was seventeen, Newton was educated at The King's School,
Grantham which taught him Latin but no mathematics. He was removed from school, and by October 1659, he
was to be found at Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, where his mother, widowed for a second time, attempted to
make a farmer of him. He hated farming.
[11]
Henry Stokes, master at the King's School, persuaded his mother
to send him back to school so that he might complete his education. Motivated partly by a desire for revenge
against a schoolyard bully, he became the top-ranked student,
[12]
distinguishing himself mainly by building
sundials and models of windmills.
[13]

In June 1661, he was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, on the recommendation of his uncle Rev William
Ayscough. He started as a subsizarpaying his way by performing valet's dutiesuntil he was awarded a
scholarship in 1664, which guaranteed him four more years until he would get his M.A.
[14]
At that time, the
college's teachings were based on those ofAristotle, whom Newton supplemented with modern philosophers
such as Descartes, andastronomers such as Galileo and Thomas Street, through whom he learned of Kepler's
work. He set down in his notebook a series of 'Quaestiones' about mechanical philosophy as he found it. In
1665, he discovered the generalised binomial theorem and began to develop a mathematical theory that later
became calculus. Soon after Newton had obtained his B.A. degree in August 1665, the university temporarily
closed as a precaution against the Great Plague. Although he had been undistinguished as a Cambridge
student,
[15]
Newton's private studies at his home in Woolsthorpe over the subsequent two years saw the
development of his theories on calculus,
[16]
optics, and the law of gravitation. In April 1667, he returned to
Cambridge and in October was elected as a fellow of Trinity.
[17][18]
Fellows were required to become ordained
priests, although this was not enforced in the restoration years and an assertion of conformity to the Church of
England was sufficient. However, by 1675 the issue could not be avoided and by then his unconventional
views stood in the way.
[19]
Nevertheless, Newton managed to avoid it by means of a special permission
from Charles II (see "Middle years" section below).
His studies had impressed the Lucasian professor, Isaac Barrow, who was more anxious to develop his own
religious and administrative potential (he became master of Trinity two years later), and in 1669, Newton
succeeded him, only one year after he received his M.A.
Middle years
Mathematics
Newton's work has been said "to distinctly advance every branch of mathematics then studied".
[20]
His work on
the subject usually referred to as fluxions or calculus, seen in a manuscript of October 1666, is now published
among Newton's mathematical papers.
[21]
The author of the manuscript De analysi per aequationes numero
terminorum infinitas, sent by Isaac Barrow to John Collins in June 1669, was identified by Barrow in a letter
sent to Collins in August of that year as:
[22]

Mr Newton, a fellow of our College, and very young ... but of an extraordinary genius and proficiency in these
things.
Newton later became involved in a dispute with Leibniz over priority in the development of calculus
(the LeibnizNewton calculus controversy). Most modern historians believe that Newton and Leibniz
developed calculus independently, although with very different notations. Occasionally it has been suggested
that Newton published almost nothing about it until 1693, and did not give a full account until 1704, while
Leibniz began publishing a full account of his methods in 1684. (Leibniz's notation and "differential Method",
nowadays recognised as much more convenient notations, were adopted by continental European
mathematicians, and after 1820 or so, also by British mathematicians.) Such a suggestion, however, fails to
notice the content of calculus which critics of Newton's time and modern times have pointed out in Book 1 of
Newton's Principia itself (published 1687) and in its forerunner manuscripts, such as De motu corporum in
gyrum ("On the motion of bodies in orbit"), of 1684. ThePrincipia is not written in the language of calculus
either as we know it or as Newton's (later) 'dot' notation would write it. His work extensively uses calculus in
geometric form based on limiting values of the ratios of vanishing small quantities: in thePrincipia itself, Newton
gave demonstration of this under the name of 'the method of first and last ratios'
[23]
and explained why he put
his expositions in this form,
[24]
remarking also that 'hereby the same thing is performed as by the method of
indivisibles'.
Because of this, the Principia has been called "a book dense with the theory and application of the infinitesimal
calculus" in modern times
[25]
and "lequel est presque tout de ce calcul" ('nearly all of it is of this calculus') in
Newton's time.
[26]
His use of methods involving "one or more orders of the infinitesimally small" is present in
his De motu corporum in gyrum of 1684
[27]
and in his papers on motion "during the two decades preceding
1684".
[28]

Newton had been reluctant to publish his calculus because he feared controversy and criticism.
[29]
He was
close to the Swiss mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier. In 1691, Duillier started to write a new version of
Newton's Principia, and corresponded with Leibniz.
[30]
In 1693, the relationship between Duillier and Newton
deteriorated and the book was never completed.
Starting in 1699, other members of the Royal Society (of which Newton was a member) accused Leibniz
of plagiarism. The dispute then broke out in full force in 1711 when the Royal Society proclaimed in a study
that it was Newton who was the true discoverer and labelled Leibniz a fraud. This study was cast into doubt
when it was later found that Newton himself wrote the study's concluding remarks on Leibniz. Thus began the
bitter controversy which marred the lives of both Newton and Leibniz until the latter's death in 1716.
[31]

Newton is generally credited with the generalised binomial theorem, valid for any exponent. He
discovered Newton's identities,Newton's method, classified cubic plane curves (polynomials of degree three in
two variables), made substantial contributions to the theory of finite differences, and was the first to use
fractional indices and to employ coordinate geometry to derive solutions to Diophantine equations. He
approximated partial sums of the harmonic series by logarithms (a precursor to Euler's summation formula),
and was the first to use power series with confidence and to revert power series. Newton's work on infinite
series was inspired by Simon Stevin's decimals.
[32]

He was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1669 on Barrow's recommendation. During that time,
any fellow of Cambridge or Oxford was required to become an ordained Anglican priest. However, the terms of
the Lucasian professorship required that the holder not be active in the church (presumably so as to have more
time for science). Newton argued that this should exempt him from the ordination requirement, and Charles II,
whose permission was needed, accepted this argument. Thus a conflict between Newton's religious views and
Anglican orthodoxy was averted.
[33]

Optics
In 1666, Newton observed that the spectrum of colours exiting a prism is oblong, even when the light ray
entering the prism is circular, which is to say, the prism refracts different colours by different angles.
[34]
This led
him to conclude that colour is a property intrinsic to lighta point which had been debated in prior years.


Replica of Newton's secondReflecting telescope that he presented to the Royal Society in 1672
[35]

From 1670 to 1672, Newton lectured on optics.
[36]
During this period he investigated the refraction of light,
demonstrating that the multicoloured spectrum produced by a prism could be recomposed into white light by
a lens and a second prism.
[37]
Modern scholarship has revealed that Newton's analysis and resynthesis of
white light owes a debt to corpuscular alchemy.
[38]

He also showed that coloured light does not change its properties by separating out a coloured beam and
shining it on various objects. Newton noted that regardless of whether it was reflected, scattered, or
transmitted, it remained the same colour. Thus, he observed that colour is the result of objects interacting with
already-coloured light rather than objects generating the colour themselves. This is known as Newton's theory
of colour.
[39]



Illustration of a dispersive prismdecomposing white light into the colours of the spectrum, as discovered by Newton
From this work, he concluded that the lens of any refracting telescope would suffer from the dispersion of light
into colours (chroma